The real stories from inside the F1 paddock

HRT – how not to do it

Bankers and Formula 1 are not a natural fit. The sport is much more suited to buccaneers and cowboys and the cautious banking types who wander into the F1 arena generally end up leaving without their shirts and often without their trousers as well. F1 is simply not a business where corporate thinking works. In F1 everything moves fast. Decisions have to be made five minutes after a question is asked. Nothing stands still. Bankers are risk-averse by nature. They are not all Gordon Geckos. When they wander into F1 and say: “It’s just like any other business” you know that they are bound to fail. The whole point is that F1 is absolutely NOT like any other business.

But rich folks always know better and bankers are prone to overestimating their own prowess.

The folk who took over Hispania Racing Team after the previous owners failed to pay their bills, were naive enough to build up the team in Spain (a daft idea). They planned to use the Spanish-ness of the team as an asset and thought that this would help them to sell the team to someone else at a later date and thus make back the money that they had loaned. They even thought that they would make a profit.

Oink, oink, flap, flap.

The pain of pouring money into an F1 team has not been to their taste and now they want someone to buy them out of their misery. They will take a big loss but, to be brutally honest, they deserve to. Rule number one when buying a racing team is to NOT try to re-invent the wheel. F1 teams are largely based in the UK for a good reason. You need expertise and thus you need to be inside the F1 cluster. Stay outside and you get the dregs – unless you are willing to pay WAY over the odds.

The team is now officially up for sale and that in itself is a message of utter defeat. This will bring all the nutters out of the woodwork and some will spin impressive tales of how much money they have to invest.

Any real live buyers would done a deal on the quiet, out of the public eye. Usually with Bernie Ecclestone involved in the background.

“F1 is simply not a business where corporate thinking works. In F1 everything moves fast. Decisions have to be made five minutes after a question is asked. Nothing stands still. Bankers are risk-averse by nature. They are not all Gordon Geckos. When they wander into F1 and say: “It’s just like any other business” you know that they are bound to fail. The whole point is that F1 is absolutely NOT like any other business.

But rich folks always know better and bankers are prone to overestimating their own prowess.”

Joe you are spot on of course !! Very funny how you see them all come and go. That will be 107th team to crash out off F1 since 1950?

Does also remind me of your friend Fernadezz too though …
“I did it with Air Asia blah blah blah F1 must be similar zzzzz…” NOT !

I think Tony Fernandes’ mid to long-term goal was to take the struggling Lotus brand (the car manufacturer) and make a successful business out of it, by first re-establishing it in F1. He’s still sort of on the way there, albeit now with Caterham Cars, and as things stand he hasn’t abandoned this project, but having the F1 Team Principal role for himself was neither his goal nor is it the best way to make use of his own abilities. Starting the project, it made sense to head the operation himself and be visible from inside and outside, to be an inspiration for the people he hired.

Yup. But Max needed Cosworth-powered teams to balance up against the manufacturers. Or at least I’ve always assumed that’s why the seemingly more credible alternatives (Prodrive, Lola …) didn’t get through while at least two comedy lash-ups (USF1 and Campos) did.

But at least they have staff, a factory, and a track record of producing successful cars.
The AMR-ONE was a dogs dinner aerodynamically (with all due respect to the people involved) with a highly dubious engine layout for an LMP.

The Mini was far too big to be a WRC car, but it was the only Mini model in which they could fit the required suspension travel.
Neither the AM engine nor the model requirements would have applied to F1, and I suspect thet they wouldn’t have made the same aero mistakes. So the

To add to some of the the Dave Richards related comments already posted, I would like to draw attention to the fact that Dave Richards was more keen on joining F1 series which allowed customer cars. The customer cars idea was vehemently opposed by Williams and then Midland team, since they thought it would give customer car teams equipped by cars of other competitive team, unfair advantage.

In that entire affair, Mosley seemed to have been on Richards side and if not for Williams and Midlans, Dave Richards was pretty much on the course to run McLaren F1 cars.

Marussia lost £49 million last year and at least one major shareholder (Lloyds bank) would doubtless like to see something back….as you have written before, Force India’s future is by no means clear…..and now HRT is up for sale. 11 teams on the grid? Maybe a lot less than that – and I wonder if this might accelerate discussions on third team cars and “customer” cars?

I really hope not, they have Customer Bikes in Moto GP (Which is prototype Motorcycle Grand Prix racing) and its tearing the sport apart. Furthermore creates a group of people who will NEVER win a race unless the leaders crash out. There’s every possibility that one of those back marker teams will get it right or find something and pow up the front they go. This will never happen with customer cars/bikes. Small time teams have been run out of business and there are only 3 manufacturers left in the sport, they’ve had to create a sub-class to allow people to put modified super-bike (road) engines in a prototype chassis so independents can afford to develop a bike and compete.

Joe if you did want to put a team in Europe surely northern Italy is the other place to go, with Ferrari, STR and Sauber (over the border in switzerland) the only teams outside the UK (Excluding HRT).

Because even if we assume that Mallya’s and Sahara’s financial woes affect the team, if there’s anyone at all waiting in the wings with an interest in running a team, Bernie will make sure that they get in touch with Force India rather than HRT – the former being a much better bet and much more worth saving than the latter.

I seem to recall Bernie confidently, gleefully it seemed, predicting that there would be only 10 teams at most for 2011. Well he was wrong. They at least lasted this long, an achievement of sorts I guess.

I know he says these things for political reasons, but why is that journos never remind Bernie that he was wrong. I want his nose rubbed in it. His unfair, damaging statements seemed to be let to lie to easily.

Can I be the first to trot out the tired cliche about making a small fortune in motor racing?

The only hope for HRT is a benevolant billionaire or the Middle Eastern connection mentioned in their press release. I’m thinking the Middle East have invested as much as their comfortable with so far (Ferrari, McLaren, Mercedes, Williams’ Qatar connections).

Shame for Pedro de la Rosa, but at least Thesan aren’t going through a charade of preparing for 2014 when, chances are, none of the car manufacturer engine suppliers will care to provide engines.

Ooops. Two more drivers looking for rides amongst the cluster of those looking to join, or maybe rejoin, the F1 grid.
Bit of a shame. I’m not going to personally miss the two incumbents but there are a couple of former, plus a raft of newcomers I would have liked to see in a seat – (that’s a race seat not a Friday seat-warmer).

Red Bull bought moribund Jaguar and look at the result. An article was published today about Coca-Cola entering F1 under an energy-drink banner. You can see where I’m going. “Not a chance in hell” on that too?

But Jaguar was light years ahead of HRT in terms of its position in the F1 pack – occasional front row starts, fairly regular points-scoring and even a couple of podium finishes. And of course it was located in motorsport valley. Minardi would be a closer comparison, but even that perennial minnow was often more competitive than HRT (and Marussia and Caterham…)

I’m not sure whether I agree or disagree with Minardi being more competitive. It’s true that they scored points, and in the days when only the top six got points, but reliability throughout the grid was much, much worse back then.

Red Bull bought a moribund Jaguar, located slap bang in Motorsport Valley and based on a solid GP-winning Stewart GP foundation. different story to HRT which has lurched from precarious situation to precarious situation.

I understand how 3-car teams would spell doom for the midfield… as if greatly improved reliability hasn’t done that already…

But I don’t understand how customer cars would do the same… unless one thinks that a customer-car version of any of the Top-3 could actually compete.

Given how much thing among the upper echelon change from race to race, is it likely that a customer-car could out-do Sauber or Williams or etc? (This is a real question, not just an argumentative point…)

Because if smaller teams used customer cars on a shoestring budget and were competing directly with Williams and Sauber, then the backers and sponsors of the latter might start to wonder why they’re pouring so much money into teams with budgets 5 times bigger.

Assuming we’ve read the same BBC Sport story, the gist is that Thesan Capital hope to see the team in a few weeks and become a ‘reference’ in F1 (whatever that means), as opposed to will sell the team.

As an aside and playing with semantics, the various assets could be sold in a few weeks in a variety of lots to all and sundry (for instance, the transporters would have a value to someone, such as an F3 team for instance), so as such the team would in effect be sold within the stated timescale. What this would mean, of course, is that HRT would be no more.

I agree with the general point that you might have a greater chance of success as an F1 team is you are located in England, but on the other hand Sauber and STR have done OK despite being relatively out on a limb; I don’t think being in Spain is the main factor defining HRT’s competitiveness. The more significant issue is the fact of the team never having had enough money, which, true, was probably as much due to the fact of them having a strong Spanish identity as anything else. At the time, perhaps the numbers made sense but within a few months of the idea being launched Spain’s economic landscape had radically changed.

I like the team because they are real underdogs and are having a real good crack at it with little in the way of resources but ultimately they probably don’t deserve to stay in F1, sadly.

STR’s probably in the best place other than the UK to set up an F1 team – Dallara and Ferrari, plus a pile of supercar manufacturers as well as a certain amount of aeronautical industry. (I was once told that the Tornado wings (made in Italy) were one of the better made parts of the aircraft…)

I’m sorry, I think you are 100% wrong about their location. Sauber was in world champion sportscar racing over 20 years ago and in F1 since 1993 – they have built their own “local” set of skills and experts – and they have enough draw to bring in others from the UK, I would suggest. STR has an even longer F1 history and is, of course, based in Italy where Ferrari also generates F1/racing tradition and skills.

Spain just doesn’t have this. Clearly there will be gifted engineers there, but it’s the deep experience and specific F1-related skills that will be missing – perhaps the best of the best in Spain go into bike racing.

They come and they go. Lets start from the back of the grid – HRT has the “for sale” board up, Marussia lost almost £50 million last year and I am sure Lloyds would love to offload it, Force India has owners who maybe owe 4 BILLION dollars between them. Cater ham are an odd team – no talk of being tight for money but how deep are Tony Fernandes’ pockets? Torro Rosso – are they still owned by Red Bull, they were trying to offload it a while back? Williams who rely on dodgy South American money and sauber who rely on Mexican money. Then lotus who are called lotus but lotus, who are bankrupt themselves, pay no money towards the team but as the car looks nice they don’t want to change it, again.. Only really Ferrari, no1 red bull team, mclaren and Mercedes seem to have any money. You can maybe cut mclaren out of that as they seem to be going for the Mexican money to offset possibly losing vodaphone.
I am sad my favourite sport is owned by people who have no interest in the sport and run by Bernie who cannot see past the next dodgy track deal from some far off emerging country looking to pay over the odds for a race, taking it further away from its traditional roots in Europe. Sad….

I don’t think SFW will ever agree to customer cars . . . in fact the kit car teams aren’t so far off being customer cars at the moment. I don’t personally see how the word ‘constructor’ could be debased any further.

Unless one is prepared to pour in several whomptillion bucks annually for at least a decade while simultaneously having unreasonable trust in someone within racing circles to handle it all, is there any non-crazy case for buying such a team? If so, what would that case be?

Joan Villaldeprat is a bit of a spent force, but Alejandro Agag seems not to be doing too badly — and Barwa would certainly be a Middle-Eastern connexion.

Of course, Thesan’s press release essentially put a big neon sign saying “MOTIVATED SELLER, CHANGED CIRCUMSTANCES FORCE SALE” over the whole outfit — not exactly the best way to extract the maximum from a potential purchaser, be it Addax or anyone else…

Joe forecast this, back when the team announced it was moving house to Spain. IIRC, he took all manner of abuse from those who thought the move would be the beginning of the racing version of the Thousand Year, um, what is the Spanish word for “Reich”?

What are the chances of any of those folks now fessing up and apologizing? Probably about the same odds as the HRT-decedent team having any success at all, ever…

Which bankers are risk averse? Last we heard HSBC, Standard, Lehman, JP Morgan, RBS, Santander… were all in the let’s-do-whatever-it-takes-to-make-money mood, including, oh yeah, laundering money from all manner of criminal sources.

Perhaps you should have said “It is not easy for today’s bankers to make money in F1″, that would have been, IMO, a more appropriate description.

Not being funny, but the Basel people created this system. The Bretton Woods papers have just been declassified, so I can’t say much until I have read them, but rigging is as essential to banking as a sail boat.

are you not a bit, erm cavalier to suggest bankers are a risk adverse lot?

I mean, in recent decades, they have reinvented the casinos with bells on.

What I would go for, though, is that I’d love it if a few rich individuals could pile in, particularly to race tracks, and get a fair deal with Bernie. I mean, whoever follows on from Bernie. Bernie I think has to play out his musical chairs.

For the false side, what that means is they wear the proverbial conservative suit and tie, and because they expect to make out so wonderfully from fragile underlying constructs, they sit there on their perch, acting holier than thou.

None of that may mean a thing, if whoever wants to get financing for n years in F1 is happy with that. But it means to me a mechanical awfulness of who deals with the deal, and that echoes maybe your worry, and that if it may take 10 years or more for F1 to find its new metier, nobody is looking to that same horizon.

Maybe one time, BE was playing “sensible banker” and thought he had one over the financiers the merchant you know whos, but I think it got beyond him. It’s one thing to keep your house in order, but another to borrow short to lend long. I mean I think they have this sport on a rolling road. That’d be not much unlike much of the economy, but it’s a unforgiving treadmill. It’s a silly dream to hope a few tracks could be anchored by very rich fans. But that would fix the capital. Please, just one of these people not use every financing trick in the book to mean they get every tax rebate because they borrow money (borrowing reduces tax in many ways) and maybe that needs tax reform. Or, simply, ignoring that, and giving actual tax breaks to the tracks, instead of public subsidy.

You’ve probably posted about it already but two questions;
If I was a phenomenally rich individual and wanted to own an F1 team could I walk up to Bernie and buy a place on the grid?
Which would be cheaper (infrastructure costs aside) buying an F1 team such as HRT or creating one from scratch?

The thing that bugs me about Joe’s – quite correct – answer, is how many commissions Bernie takes out of this. It’s still a fiefdom, and that’s really unattractive. You may point out to baseball, NFL, and others as examples equal in terms of patronage, but our cousins there really wear their hearts on their sleeves. I think it’s called selling. If you know what you’re in for, then fine. If I was silly rich, and really wanted in for a team, I’d try to create a shadow team, find something – basically any angle – that someone on the grid does not have, and then I’d look to buy one. Neither fans nor I think who are on the ground and in the factories can really enjoy all these culture missions and ownership changes, can they? Too many are batted about. Get one team boss who susses how that must affect the heads of who could do so much better if they weren’t worried / having a unfair headache / not getting paid / wondering what their team will be called next year and you have something I reckon is a rare commodity.

I tried writing up a very, very rough estimate but it just ended up as an essay.

Long story short, starting a new team means paying more for all the facilities and tooling, investing heavily in recruitment and setup costs and still having to pay a full team for about a year before you have any income at all.

I’m reckoning at least £100M thrown in before you even reach Albert Park, based on some pretty conservative estimates.

It’s a bit like wondering whether to buy a new Porsche Boxster for £40k or a 1966 Porsche 912 for £10k. Give it a couple of years and you’ll probably learn your lesson.

In part because of where they’ve set themselves up, (and in part because they’re getting a reputation for calamity) turning HRT into a profitable operation will be much harder than it would be in central-southern England where everyone else is.

If anyone seriously wants to own an F1 team, their best bet (long term) would be to buy HRT for the entry and the hardware and ship the whole damn thing to Britain. Somewhere like “Aztec West” just on the edge of Bristol, where the M4 and M5 cross. Means you can try to steal staff from Rolls Royce, EADS and Airbus as well.

HRT is doomed. They are back of the grid, stuck in Spain where there is no base of engineering talent and no local money to sponsor a team. As far as I can tell they have no significant base of design and engineering talent to even design a car, much less contruct one.
Anybody wanting to buy a team would be better advised to look at other teams with better infrastructure and/or performance. Right now we have Toro Rosso (surplus to Red Bull requirements), Force India (two owners who are financially distressed), and Marussia (deeply in debt due to restructuring), any of which can probably be purchased for the right price.

Sure! F1 is not not like any other business. But the accounting rules are!
If you spend more than you earn, sooner or later you will go bust.
Contrary to what Mosley wanted us to believe, adding more teams has not improved the show. Any team receiving just 34 Mio $ is bound to fail in today’s F1. And for as long as Mr E keeps all that money and the with the current point system here to stay, history will repeat itself.

I had to laugh when I read your article. It reminded me of another similar situation.

” But rich folks always know better and bankers are prone to overestimating their own prowess.”

Just like some people in a back water city in Korea.

Just read the following and replace “team” with “track” and “Spain” with “Korea”.

“…were naive enough to build up the team in Spain (a daft idea). They planned to use the Spanish-ness of the team as an asset and thought that this would help them to sell the team to someone else at a later date and thus make back the money that they had loaned. They even thought that they would make a profit.”

HRT have been nothing but an embarrassment from the start. They’re just moving roadblocks with no hope of being anything else – its like having a Sunday League team in the Premiership. With Marussia and Caterham you get the feeling that one day they’ll be mid-table, I doubt anyone thinks that about HRT.

The problem, as I see it, is that anyone buying the team will have to move it again in a year or two, or continue outside of the F1 hubs, with the base in Spain, gaining few decent results (if any).

What interests me this season is how annoymous they have been, save running Ma a few times in practice. You have heard the commentators speak of the Marussias running highly, how Pic is doing, and how high up Kovy has got the Caterham. Then there’s the Caterham news constantly coming out, the new alliance with Renault, the new team principle…

To be honest, until this news came up, I’d forgotten about HRT, save one moment in Malaysia…

Joe, fascinating post (and resulting commentary) as usual. If I recall from a previous post, the back-marker teams still do receive reasonable prize money/contingency from FOM. Although the idea of it may be distasteful, could one potentially generate a profit by running HRT as a start-and-park program as the back part of a NASCAR grid does?

Any idea what the estimated price for the HRT sale is? (I’m not looking to buy, I’m just curious…I didn’t see any mention of it above, but there’s a lot of comments so I may have missed it; if so, I apologize).

Is there any chance another front-runner team goes the Redbull route and picks up a smaller team? I know they have to be separate and Redbull is not a manufacturer so they can get away with it (Ferrari would need to completely separate a ‘junior’ team somehow). With resource-restriction becoming more of a topic, Ferrari and McLaren would have extra people and money to spend. (p.s. I never said it was a good idea)

Well written, funny and almost right but you miss the whole reason as to why they were in it and what they really expected to get from F1…….. I’ll just ‘float’ that one by you.

Joe your reference to ‘dregs’ is insulting and largely inaccurate, there are many reasons for wanting to live and work in a different country.
I keep my views to myself about the difference between Journalists with Pitpasses and those without so maybe you want to think twice about the people who create the environment you feed off of?

HRT value is nothing. They have nothing to be sold. HQs are hired from Madrid Council, the tools have been taken from busted Epsilon Euskadi facilities, no design team, no developing team, no car for silly season, no sponsorship… the only thing they have is a huge debt with providers and (most important) with their own employees… It is known that they ask for 40 million, but the only real thing they can afford to offer is the F1 license. And we all know that asking uncle Bernie for one of these would be much cheaper and proffitable. I am a very big fan of PDLR but once again, he did not make the right choice…It could be nice if we see Pedro driving a Toyota in the endurance Championship…